openerp-community team mailing list archive

[Stefan Rijnhart <stefan@xxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

In response to a discussion on this list that ended around here [1], we 
at Therp want to propose a new community project for maintaining a set 
of branches of OpenERP with a number of additional bugfixes. Below are 
our suggestions as to how such a project should be organized. We are 
curious to know what you think and how we can run this project together.

This is not a fork. We love OpenERP and how OpenERP SA is developing and 
marketing it. They even acknowledged that bug fixes were not merged fast 
enough in the 6.1 lifecycle. But even a dramatic improvement in this 
respect will not satisfy everyone. Like many other parties supporting 
OpenERP, we need branches that include at least the bugfixes that we 
delivered to our customers. We know that many parties maintain such 
branches. Therp has maintained theirs publically and used the Launchpad 
bugtracker to track which bugs it includes. As has been said a couple of 
times about this theme, 'we may as well share the effort'.

This is not for the faint of heart. As Olivier Dony reminded us recently 
on twitter, the current bug fixing policy is partly the result of the 
5.0 days in which bugs were fixed and merged on stable very quickly, 
which lead to a lot of regressions. Also, this is not a project in which 
end users can participate or will be supported. This is a project for 
developers who review each others bugfixes. Sorry if you are a user who 
expected more in this respect. Then again, anyone can hire a developer 
to participate.

Please bear in mind that although the text below is written as a set of 
guidelines, it is just a proposal that is open to discussion.

* Projects

The project urls are:
- https://launchpad.net/ocb-addons
- https://launchpad.net/ocb-server
- https://launchpad.net/ocb-web

These projects have 7.0 series only for now. If other contributors are 
interested in series for older versions of OpenERP, these can be added 
as well.

* Branches

The branches under the 7.0 series should be updated with the latest 
commits from the official branches every day, using a script that we 
developed called replay_missing.py [2]. As the name indicates, we 
started out calling the replay function of the bzr-rewrite plugin but 
after experiencing serious problems with it we resorted to committing 
each missing revision as a separate, cherrypicking merge. This seems to 
be working flawlessly even when tested against modified branches such as 
the Therp backports. Even so, this must be considered as the most 
experimental and vulnerable part of the design. When a conflict occurs, 
manual intervention is the only solution. In time, we will start 
notifying the members of the ocb team of the results of the nightly 
merge job. (If you are a low level bzr expert, please tell us if you 
think that this approach may lead to problems)

* Bugs and proposals

The Launchpad bug tracker is the glue between the official projects and 
the backports. If you have contributed or tested a bugfixing branch to 
on of the official projects, you can can prepare a merge proposal on the 
corresponding backports project. Due to limitations of Launchpad it is 
not possible to create a proposal for the same branch on different 
projects. Therefore, the procedure would be to start all over with a 
branch of the backports project, make your changes, push and propose. 
You can do that manually but we wanted to provide a tool to streamline 
this a little bit. We came up with a clone script for merge proposals 
[3], which allows you to propagate (unmerged) bugfixing branches and 
their proposals to the backports branches. You can read up on how to use 
it here [4]. This is also a recent development, so use with care.

If you have a bugfix that you can vouch for, please add the appropriate 
backports branch to the OpenERP bug in Launchpad, by clicking 'Also 
affects project'. Also indicate the version that is affected by clicking 
'Assign to series'. Set the bug status on this series to 'fix 
committed'. Please do not touch any setting from the official project, 
as this is the domain of the OpenERP developers.

Please indicate on the proposal if you run the modification in 
production, or if the same bugfix has been approved or merged by the 
OpenERP developers.

No new bugs should be filed on the backports projects proper unless they 
report a regression specific to the backports. Similarly, no code should 
be submitted to the backports projects that is not submitted to, or 
present in the official branches.

You may encounter an OPW branch that you want to have merged without a 
bug report. There usually is one or even more bug reports on the same 
issue. In that case, you can link the bug report to the branch and 
continue from there. Otherwise file the bug yourself.

* New features

We would suggest that new features should not qualify as candidates for 
the backports branches, but maybe a separate series could be started for 
those living on the edge. Also, heavy refactorings should not be adopted 
lightly, because they might put stability at risk or because they cause 
conflicts in the mirroring system more easily.

* Team membership

The ocb team which commits the approved fixes is open for regular 
contributors. We would be pleased to have the community reviewers team 
as a member of this project, but that decision should be left to the 
good people of CampToCamp, who are the most active participants of this 
team by far. Of course, not being a member of ocb does not restrict 
anyone in submitting or reviewing merge proposals.

We would like to invite you to respond with your insights concerning the 
suggested workflow and guidelines as suggested above.

Cheers,
Stefan



[1] https://lists.launchpad.net/openerp-community/msg01492.html
[2] 
http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~therp-nl/lp-community-utils/replaybot_clone_mp_to_community/view/head:/replay_missing.py
[3] 
http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~therp-nl/lp-community-utils/replaybot_clone_mp_to_community/view/head:/clone_mp_to_community.py
[4] https://answers.launchpad.net/ocb-addons/+faq/2222

--
Therp - Maatwerk in open ontwikkeling

Stefan Rijnhart - Ontwerp en implementatie

mail: stefan@xxxxxxxx
tel: +31 (0) 614478606
http://therp.nl
https://twitter.com/therp_stefan